What better way to use my 1,000th post than to become a millionaire. And you can too. All we need is your chemistry expertise.
Imagine you are at a carnival. One consession stand sells rock candy. The other sells cotton candy. Which of the two stands, essentially offering the same substance, does the brisker trade?
Would most people choose the cotton candy? But even during the current obesity pandemic in America, pure sugar is still too much for most people to eat on a regular basis. And, sadly, there are already far, far too many people willing to sell it. How about offering a healthy alternative?
Our main obstacle to wealth, indeed the main obstacle to improving the lives of our fellow countrymen, is the ability to produce foodstuffs other than sucrose in a spun form? Something healthier, yet still as fun to eat as cotton candy, and therfore twice as marketable. This would kick the Juiceman’s ass up between is owlish eyebrows: the world is awash in juice. But cottoney food is still lodged in our minds as a special treat.
Think of the experience - a consumer would go up to a cart similar to today’s espresso cart, and instead of pointing to a bottle of hazelnut or vanila syrup, they’d select a fresh piece of fruit, or a medley of same. Before their eyes, the consessionaire would process the fresh item into a bobbin-load of healthy eating enjoyment.
Why? If I wanted fruit, I’d go to the store and buy it. But fruit sucks - that’s why I eat Cadbury Crunchie bars instead. If you figure out a way to make cotton candy that tastes like Crunchie bars, let me know.
(Most)Fruit is mostly water, you can’t spin water into solid filaments at normal ambient temperatures. You could dehydrate it, but you’d still be left with a bunch of solids that contained a high proportion of fibre, which might prevent it being spun, so you could remove this and spin the remaining sugar, but it would be easier just to start with sugar and add some natural flavourings and vitamins.
I’m with you, Slithy.
That sounds really, really appealing. I like fruit, but I eat a lot of it and being able to enjoy it in a fun and different way is definitely something I would spend money on.
I wonder if it could be done by adding some kind of gelatin to pureed fruit to help it solidify into threads?
Um, it’s still sugar. An apple has a few grams of dietary fiber, and on average about 20 grams of carbohydrates, mostly in the form of fructose (levulose if you are about 200 years old). It has a lower glycemic index than pure glucose, but it won’t help much with weight loss, especially if you eat the same amounts you would of regular cotton candy.
I was thinking about it, and I think the best way to go would be to dehydrate the fruit first, then grind it into powder so that it would be light enough, like sugar.
Ilsa’s probably right, it really wouldn’t be all that much healthier than regular cotton candy, but I still think it would be pretty tasty.
Or, what about just using the powdered fruit as a sugar substitute? Still not a health food, but could be interesting in place of sugar in coffee, on cereal, or in baking.
How about sno-cones made from shaved frozen fruit juice? You can add artificial sweeteners to make it even more fast-foodish palatably sweet.
Actually, when I’m at the boardwalk, I go for the fresh orangeade (which is pureed orange flesh (with pulp), sugar, and ice). Yeah, too much processed sugar, but the use of real oranges rationalizes it in my mind.
WRT ‘spinning’ foods: The problem with that is the extra processing takes away the health benefit of consuming complex carbohydrates and fibre, which probably can’t be ‘spun.’ It would be like the difference between whole wheat (high fiber and complex carbs) and processed white flour (almost no fiber and simple carbs).
I think the closest you’re going to get to this is some kind of fruit leather (which is actually quite nice), or something like those fruit winders, which are just sticky strips of concentrated sweetened fruit pulp.
The problem is that it’s the properties of sugar which allow it to be spun. An idle thought - I wonder if it would be a good application for tagatose:
The chief virtue of tag as a non-caloric sweetener is that it really IS sugar, not something much sweeter which has to be cut with a filler, making it behave badly in applications requiring the physical properties of sugar. Perhaps tag could be used to make nearly calorie-free cotton candy.
The usual filler in artificial sweeteners is maltodextrin, which seems to be the case with “Splenda”, the trade name sucralose is being marketed under (sucralose is a sugar with 3 of the hydroxl groups replaced by chlorine - it’s 600 times the sweetness of regular sugar). How well that might behave physically in attempting to spin the stuff, I don’t know. You find a lot of claims out there that Splenda won’t carmelize, and some like Mangetout’s that it can. I would guess that it’s finicky - you can get it to under ideal conditions.
Or it could be that burnt maltodextrin superficially resembles caramel; I received a sample pack of Splenda through the door and I thought I’d just try caramelising a little on a teaspoon with my chef’s blowtorch - it turned black, sticky and tasted like caramel, but the structural properties may not have been entirely similar.